Editor: This is a response to 鈥淔eds urged to cancel grow-op licences鈥� (The Times, March 11).

Although I don鈥檛 use it, nor want my kids to use it, the little green plant has no basis for the amount of antipathy shown toward it. For millennia, its curative power has been used to treat both physical and mental/emotional conditions with great success in the right circumstances.

I鈥檓 uncomfortable with the ongoing knee-jerk reactions of powerful people, reactions that only serve to keep the means to grow and distribute it in the hands of the criminals who care little what the plant is used for. It is well known that criminals will and do often kill, maim, extort, and make huge piles of tax-free profit at the expense of those who use it for curative or pleasurable purpose.

The specious argument for closure made by our local RCMP head is that a few grow-op licensees have had grow-rips and break-ins happen. If this is solid logic, then we should surely shut down car dealerships that sell us vehicles that are broken into, stolen or trashed at the hands of idiot criminals.

Banks should close immediately, having shown clearly that they cannot be trusted to do the people鈥檚 business without multi-billion dollar white-collar crime, destroying the ability of a quick economic recovery in North America.

Churches should close their doors permanently, considering the huge number of sexual crimes against children and young men and women that have become a heavily publicized blight upon organized religion.

The 91原创s鈥� two mayors are of a single mind: distribution should be through pharmacies. There can鈥檛 be many pharmacies that would want to become a cannabis distribution centre, considering their prominently placed signs about how little of this or that type of narcotic they have onsite, meant to prevent robberies.

My point is that the only good choice is to legalize and tax marijuana, and begin to treat  people as grown-ups, thus taking the biker gangs and high-ranking criminal element out of the equation within months. And stop demonizing one of nature鈥檚 greatest gifts 鈥� if we only had the guts to use it that way.

Eli Bryan Nelson,

91原创